together, both of them knew that, sense mixed with nonsense, hope with despair, justification with criticism, compassion with disdain.
“If I could only go back to my time in Spain and stay there,” Harry would sometimes say. And, feverishly, turning brutally to Laura, he would go on in a softer and softer but also hoarser voice: “Why don’t you leave me, why are you staying with me?”
It was the moment of temptation. The moment when she experienced doubt. She could pack up and leave. It was possible. She could stay and put up with everything. That too was possible. But she could do neither: neither walk out just like that nor stay passively. She listened to Harry and again and again made the same decision: I’ll stay, but I’ll do something, I won’t just take care of him, I won’t just try to encourage him, I’ll try to understand him, to find out what happened to him, why he knows all the stories of that infamous time and yet doesn’t know his own story, why he won’t tell me, the one who loves him, his story, why…
It was as if he read her mind. It happens with couples linked more by passion than by custom, we read each other’s mind, Harry, a look is enough, a wave of a hand, a feigned distraction, a dream penetrated the same way a body is penetrated sexually, to know what the other is thinking, you’re thinking about Spain, about Jim, about how he saved himself by dying young, how he didn’t have time to become a victim of history, he was a victim of the war, that’s noble, that’s heroic; but being a victim of history, not foreseeing, not dodging history’s blow in time, or not taking its full force when it does hit us, that’s sad, Harry, that’s terrible.
“It’s all been a farce, an error.”
“I love you, Harry, that’s neither a farce nor an error.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I’m not tricking you.”
“Everybody’s tricked me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Everybody.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Why don’t you find out on your own?”
“No, I’d never do anything behind your back.”
“Don’t be a fool. I’m giving you permission. Go ahead, go back to Cuernavaca, ask them about me, tell them I gave you permission, they should tell you the truth.”
“The truth, Harry?”
(The truth is that I love you, Harry, I love you in a different way from the way I once loved my husband, different from the way I loved Orlando Ximenez or even Jorge Maura, I love you the way I loved them, as a woman who lives and sleeps with a man, but with you it’s different, Harry, besides loving you as I loved those men, I love you as I loved my brother Santiago the First and my son Santiago the Second, I love you as if I’d already seen you die, Harry, as I saw my brother, dead and buried with his unfulfilled promise, my son, resigned and handsome, that’s how I love you, Harry, as a son, a brother, and a lover, but with one difference, my love: I loved them as a woman, as a mother, as a lover, and I love you as a bitch, I know neither you nor anyone else will understand me, but I love you as a bitch, I wish I could give birth to you and then bleed to death, that’s the image that makes you different from my husband, my lover, or my sons, my love for you is the love of an animal that would love to put itself in your place and die instead of you, but only at the price of becoming your bitch, I’ve never felt this before and I’d like to explain it to myself and can’t, but that’s how it is and that’s the way it is, Harry, because only now, at your side, I ask myself questions I never asked before, I ask myself if we deserve this love, I ask myself if it’s love that exists, not you and I, and for that reason I’d like to be your animal, your bleeding, dying bitch, to say that love does exist the way a dog and a bitch exist, I want to take your love and mine away from any romantic idealism, Harry, I want to give your body and mine a last chance by rooting them in the lowest ground but also the most concrete and certain ground, where a dog and a bitch sniff, eat, entangle sexually, separate, forget each other, because I’m going to have to live with your memory when you die, Harry, and my memory of you will never be complete because I don’t know what you did during the terror, you won’t tell me, maybe you were a hero and your humility disguises itself in pugnacious honor, like John Garfield, so you won’t tell me your exploits and make your heart sentimental, you who weep when Libertad Lamarque sings in those movies of hers, but maybe you were a traitor, Harry, a squealer, and that shames you and that’s why you’d like to go back to Spain, be young, die at the side of your young friend Jim in the war and have war and death instead of history and dishonor: which is the truth? I think it’s the first, because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have been accepted in that circle of victims over in Cuernavaca, but it may be the second because they never look at you, never address you, they invite you over and let you sit there, not talking to you but not attacking you, until your chair is like the dock where the accused sits, and you know me and you’re not alone anymore and we should leave Cuernavaca, leave your comrades behind, not hear those arguments repeated ad nauseam anymore.)
“We should have denounced Stalin’s crimes before the war.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You’d have been expelled from the Party. Besides, when you’re up against the enemy you simply have to forget certain things.”
“Still, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have talked about the errors of the Soviet Union among ourselves. We’d have been more human, we’d have defended ourselves better against the McCarthyite assault.”
“How could we imagine what was going to happen?” Harry said one night, drinking beer at nightfall in the little garden backed by the mountain and redolent of the aromas of the blooming flowers and dying trees. “We American Communists fought first in Spain, then in the war against the Axis. It was the French Communists who really organized the Resistance, the Russian Communists who saved everyone at Stalingrad, who’d have thought that when the war was over being a Communist would be a sin and that all of us Communists would end up on the bonfire? Who?”
Another cigarette. Another Dos Equis.
“Being faithful to the impossible. That was our sin.”
Laura had asked him if he was married, and Harry said he was but he preferred not to talk about it. “It’s all over.” He tried to end the conversation.
“You know it isn’t. You have to tell me everything. We have to live it together. If we are going to go on living together, Harry.”
“The rages, the fights, the sermons, the nervousness about the secret meetings, the suspicion that the accusers were right?
“Were you honest with your wife?”
“I was weak. I spilled my guts to her. Everything. I told her my doubts. Was what I wrote for the movies valid, or did they make me believe it was good because it served a cause-the cause, the only good cause? Are we paying a very high price for something that wasn’t worth it? And she said to me, Harry, what you write is shit. But not because you’re a Communist, my love. It’s that your little flame went out. See things as they really are. You had talent. Hollywood stole it from you. It was a small talent, but it was a talent. You lost what little you had. That’s what she told me, Laura.”
“Things will be different with me.”
“I can’t, I can’t. No more.”
“I want to live with you.” (In the name of my brother Santiago and my son Santiago, and take care of you now, as I either didn’t know how to or couldn’t take care of them, you understand, you get mad, you ask me not to treat you like a child, and I show you I’m not your mother, Harry, I’m your bitch, you don’t use your mother like an animal, you don’t use your lover that way, your romantic Hollywood sensibility wouldn’t let you, Harry, but in my case, I’m asking you for it, let me be your bitch, even if I bark at you sometimes, I’m not your mother, your wife, or your sister.)
“Be my bitch.”
He smoked and drank, attacking his lungs and his blood each time he opened his mouth. She pretended to drink with him, but she drank cider, saying it was whiskey, feeling like a cabaret whore who drinks colored water that her customer takes to be French cognac. She was ashamed of the trick, but she didn’t want to get sick, because if that happened, who would take care of Harry? One day, she’d woken up in Cuernavaca in 1952 and seen the weak, sick man at her side. She’d right away decided that from then on her life would have meaning only if she devoted it to
